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Does anyone have experience with both PHP and Cold Fusion? I would like some honest, open minded opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of each. I am particularly interested in such things as time to create code, ease of code maintenance, availability & quality of technical support (for someone willing to pay for tech support), ease of database usage and interoperability with different databases.

--------------------To call humans 'rational beings' does injustice to the term, 'rational.' Humans are capable of rational thought, but it is not their essence. Humans are animals, beasts with complex brains. Humans, more often than not, utilize their cerebrum to rationalize what their primal instincts, their preconceived notions, and their emotional desires have presented as goals - humans are rationalizing beings.

I would strongly suggest PHP. Cold Fusion is nice but I've found that its moe expensive And 99% of web hosting servers can handle PHP, cold fusion is (and correct me if I'm wrong) but it seems that web hosting companies that host cold fusion apps are a little more expensive.

I realize that Cold Fusion is more expensive, but I'm more interested in the technical aspects. The use will be for intranets, things will have to be set up and maintenance may be done by in-house staff, so ease of use/coding/maintenance is a big factor. Which has more (useful) built in functions, so programming goals can be accomplished quicker? Example: if it takes ## lines of code (or hours) in PHP to do this, it will take ## lines of code (or hours) in Cold Fusion to accomplish the same thing.

Also, the quality of technical support from Zend/Allaire is important.

Another big factor is being able to switch or attach to different data bases with minimal code changes (my understanding is that Cold Fusion is much better in this respect - but please enlighten me if there is a suitable work around for PHP).

--------------------To call humans 'rational beings' does injustice to the term, 'rational.' Humans are capable of rational thought, but it is not their essence. Humans are animals, beasts with complex brains. Humans, more often than not, utilize their cerebrum to rationalize what their primal instincts, their preconceived notions, and their emotional desires have presented as goals - humans are rationalizing beings.

Although I haven't used Cold Fusion much, I do know it is hard to setup/code/maintain. It's very similar to ASP because it needs to run on a special platform and it's not open source.

PHP is very easy to learn if you've done some type of coding in the past (even just HTML).

What type of technical support do you plan on needing?

"Another big factor is being able to switch or attach to different data bases with minimal code changes (my understanding is that Cold Fusion is much better in this respect - but please enlighten me if there is a suitable work around for PHP). "

If by "different data bases" you mean Oracle, MySQL, etc then yes PHP can handle them fairly easily. There are database wrappers that allow all the code to stay the same, you just have to change a configuration option in the script to use a different type of database.

Another great thing about PHP is the overwhealming amount of free prewritten scripts/programs out there.

--------------------To call humans 'rational beings' does injustice to the term, 'rational.' Humans are capable of rational thought, but it is not their essence. Humans are animals, beasts with complex brains. Humans, more often than not, utilize their cerebrum to rationalize what their primal instincts, their preconceived notions, and their emotional desires have presented as goals - humans are rationalizing beings.